We’re all familiar with the concepts of full and incremental image backups and their value in any backup and disaster recovery strategy. What is less known is how far many of today’s backup solutions actually go to ensure that the most critical aspects of your data, including its integrity are preserved and the amount of time needed to recover those very assets; most notably organizations using Microsoft Domain Controller and/or SQL Services.

Determining the Right Solution:

When we speak to our clients, we bring up the concepts of RPO and RTO to help identify the most appropriate backup and disaster recovery strategy for their needs and recovery expectation.

Other Considerations:

Although a great starting point to determine the best backup and recovery plan, there are a multitude of other factors to consider when implementing your continuity plan, including what servers are being backed up, and what are your end users doing that could impact the restoration of a server. In the recent months we’ve identified through a number of internal exercises that regardless of the backup solution in place, considerable challenges associated with restoring a Domain Controller and SQL servers with conventional backup solutions can occur, despite their promising back of the box descriptions. We’ve witnessed events where even the smallest instance of data corruption or accidental deletion does not in fact provide the recovery times that would be associated with any other facet of the recovery strategy, and should be amended- immediately. Many are unaware the average recovery time for a DC or SQL server forces an entire restore of those servers from previous backups (approximately 1 day), adding time to recovery and additional loss of revenue/productivity.

Recommendation:

However, there is a solution, or rather, insurance policy, to help mitigate and all together limit your exposure from downtime; System State Backups. Adding this additional layer to your backup strategy can dramatically reduce the amount of downtime and provide the ability to diagnose and isolate specific backups, instead of undergoing the complicated process of restoring an entire server and hoping the data was preserved. All in all it’s a valuable addition to your current backup strategy, specifically for those using DC and SQL. To learn more about today’s array of backup solutions, or how to incorporate System State Backups to your plan, please Contact Us today!

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